For example, the butterfly was primarily associated with joy and weddings, but because its name (hudie) is a pun for “age seventy to eighty,” it also symbolized longevity.

From biblical times onward, the concept of having an expensive textile underfoot has been associated with wealth, power, and sanctity.

Though the Burgundian court was the single most important artistic patron during the period, private citizens were no less interested in using art to express their spiritual concerns and personal ambitions.

Former intern Wellington writes about his impression of Édouard Manet's The Spanish Singer, and discusses how art can be used to illustrate respect for and acceptance of other cultures.

Caravaggio pushed the figures up against the picture plane and used light to enhance the dramatic impact and give the figures a quality of immediacy.

His compositions are mostly invented and exhibit the most discriminating formal relationships, including those of color. In addition, Vermeer’s application of paint reveals extraordinary technical ability and time-consuming care.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, the most admired—perhaps the greatest—European painter who ever lived, possessed a miraculous gift for conveying a sense of truth.

Whether they were made as objects for veneration, as records of human existence in a certain time and place, or as adornments for private dwellings or public sites, early Netherlandish paintings reveal the pursuit of a common goal—to make the painted image vividly present and to render the unseen palpable.

Islamic art, architecture, and cultural traditions are closely related to other artistic movements around the world. In conjunction with the opening of the new Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, which house works from the Met's Department of Islamic Art, I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight related objects from the Museum's other curatorial departments.

The use of botanical imagery in painting proliferated especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as artists became increasingly interested in the realistic depiction of objects from the natural world.